During the Neolithic Revolution, seven populations independently invented agriculture. In this paper, I argue that this innovation was a response to a large increase in climatic seasonality. Hunter-gatherers in the most affected regions became sedentary in order to store food and smooth their consumption. I present a model capturing the key incentives for adopting agriculture, and I test the resulting predictions against a global panel dataset of climate conditions and Neolithic adoption dates. I find that invention and adoption were both systematically more likely in places with higher seasonality. The findings of this paper imply that seasonality patterns 10,000 years ago were amongst the major determinants of the present day global distribution of crop productivities, ethnic groups, cultural traditions, and political institutions.

Figure 2 in the paper illustrates the locations and times of the adoption of agriculture:

Andrea looks at both these adoption dates and the rapidity of the spread of agriculture from these locations and compares them to the climatic seasonality of those locations, finding a strong connection between seasonality and adoption of agriculture. He argues that the need to store food caused people to become sedentary as opposed to nomadic, and once they were sedentary the opportunity cost of farming was greatly reduced.

We discuss the role of perspective diversity in political philosophy, with reference to both Ryan's book and his article, Diversity and Disagreement are the Solution, Not the Problem. We relate the philosophy to political divides in the real world, such as the rise of nationalist movements in Europe.

What role does government play in the provision of public goods? Economists have used the lighthouse as an empirical example to illustrate the extent to which the private provision of public goods is possible. This inquiry, however, has neglected the private provision of lightships. We investigate the private operation of the world’s first modern lightship, established in 1731 on the banks of the Thames estuary going in and out of London. First, we show that the Nore lightship was able to operate profitably and without government enforcement in the collection of payment for lighting services. Second, we show how private efforts to build lightships were crowded out by Trinity House, the public authority responsible for the maintaining and establishing lighthouses in England and Wales. By including lightships into the broader lighthouse market, we argue that the provision of lighting services exemplifies not a market failure, but a government failure.

Economists have been using lighthouses as examples of pure public goods since at least John Stuart Mill. This modern debate on whether lighthouses really deserve their status as the archetypical example goes back to Coase (1974), who pointed out that many lighthouses in Great Britain had been privately funded through harbour fees. According to the theory of pure public goods, free riding should have destroyed this market, but it didn't. This has sparked a spirited debate about just how private those "private" lighthouses were, and whether the level of government intervention in the lighthouse market was necessary to solve the free rider problem.

Candela and Geloso's work on lightships shows that a pure private solution to the lighthouse problem actually existed historically. They detail the launching of the first lightship by the entrepreneurs David Avery and Robert Hamblin at the mouth of the Thames River in 1731, and the ways they were able to finance this apparently "public" good.

Bickerton (2009, 2014) hypothesizes that language emerged as the solution to a scavenging problem faced by proto-humans. We design a virtual world to explore how people use words to persuade others to work together for a common end. By gradually reducing the vocabularies that the participants can use, we trace the process of solving the hominin scavenging problem. Our experiment changes the way we think about social dilemmas. Instead of asking how does a group overcome the self-interest of its constituents, the question becomes, how do constituents persuade one another to work together for a common end that yields a common benefit?